Who am I?

August of 2011. Just a couple of months prior to this point I graduated high school and was getting ready to start my first semester at Guilford Technical Community College in Jamestown, North Carolina. Just a year prior back in the summer of 2010 my mother died in a car wreck and the world had become a different place for me. I started looking for a greater sense of purpose and belonging in the world in a way that I never had before. I always knew what kind of person I was, but I was never sure about who I was meant to be and the journey to making that discovery started here.

All my life growing up I knew a lot about myself. I always had a deep love for film and music and wished one day I would be able to leave my mark in those worlds of artistic expression, but I never made any plans to pursue a career in those areas. I was always a slacker growing up. As I once heard someone say, I was basically an idiot survivalist, heavy on the idiot part. After my mother died something in me just sparked. I felt this drive to want to do something meaningful and important with my life that I knew she’d be proud of me for accomplishing. Though I never cared for school and college as a kid, after my mom died I decided it was time to take these things as serious as she always did when I was little. So I start my first semester in college and though I was scared at first, I slowly began to enjoy it soon after.

As my first successful year in college came to a close I started realizing that I was on a journey to discover who I was meant to be and where my place was in the world. During this time I spent a lot of my time alone while focusing on my studies. It was at this point that I became active on social media after never have used it before when I was growing up. When I entered the world of social media I started reconnecting with so many people from every point in my life and writing to them a lot in my spare time. I would also find myself writing a lot about what was happening in the world around me.

At a number of points around my studies my personal life began to get a little complicated and what I did not realize was that the best way I dealt with these struggles was by writing on my Facebook page as a form of venting and self expression. Things would only get more complicated for me overtime. Eventually I was out of school for a while due to complications with financial aid and I was eventually on a mission to get a job and a car so that I could get back in school and earn my associates degree. This was my biggest goal at the time and I was determined to accomplish it by any means necessary. I eventually did get a job working at Bojangles and saved up enough money to get back in school and get a car. Within less than a year’s time I walked across the stage at the Greensboro coliseum and earned my Associates degree in arts.

I was never more proud of myself at any other time than I was on this day. I also knew that I still had a ways to go and was determined to discover the man I was meant to become. While at my graduation I ran into the first teacher I had when I made it back in school. He was my English literature teacher and after talking to him one final time I realized how much I enjoy the writing assignments I had in his class because they were often very self reflective of the type of post I was writing on my social media. It was here that I discovered who I was meant to be.

After my graduation I thought a lot about my mom and how relieved I was that I made her proud. I also thought alot about how much emphasis she put on the importance of education by having me read and write a lot. Then I thought about how much I loved expressing myself with writing on social media and how much I loved how writing was an important part of all the things I love like fi, music and literature. I thought to myself “I’m a pretty decent writer and I’ve been connected to it my entire life. No matter how much it drifts away from me, it always tends to find its way back. I knew then that this is who I was meant to be.

Fast forward to today. I write for Vocal.com on a daily basis, everyone knows how great I am at writing and that I seek to make a successful career out of my writing. It took a long time for me to discover who I am, but now I know and my identity crisis has been solved in that regard. Who am I? I am Joe Patterson and I am a writer.